Monday, February 1, 2016

Tim Ball is conspiratorially lost in the blizzards of 2015 and 2016

Not content with denying climate change, now WUWT is denying the weather. I noticed this claim about storm Jonas at WUWT today, which the meteorologist (ret'd) missed. Tim Ball is claiming that Jonas forecasts failed (archived here). In his article he weaves a conspiracy theory of mammoth proportions, ticking the boxes of six of the seven criteria for conspiracy ideation. This includes twisting the facts to fit his conspiracy theory. It also requires Tim to refer to a 12 month old article about last year's blizzard as proof that the this year's blizzard didn't happen - or something. Wrong storm, wrong year - Tim got his blizzards mixed up.

An overview of storm Jonas

Before beginning on Tim's wildly imaginative conspiracy theorising, here's a short recap of storm Jonas.

Storm Jonas was the fourth most severe storm in the region in at least the past 66 years. Early warnings began more than a week before the storm was forecast to hit, giving people plenty of time to prepare. All the weather models were in general agreement, unusually for a storm like this. The forecasts were remarkably accurate. The dump of snow on New York city was a bigger than expected but otherwise the weather forecasts were pretty well spot on. The storm killed 55 people, caused a storm surge as big or maybe bigger than Hurricane Sandy, dumped record snow in some built up areas, shut down activity in some of the busiest parts of the USA, and resulted in more than $2 billion damage.

I've added more detail below, as well as in the references at the bottom of this article.

Tim Ball's conspiracy theory - storm Jonas was a hoax

Tim Ball wrote an article under the headline: "It Is Time For A Complete Cleanup After "The Blizzard Of 2016."" As usual, it's difficult to follow his line of argument. It appears that Tim thinks storm Jonas was a hoax of the climate conspiracy kind. He wrote (with my emphasis of his conspiratorial theorising):

They are physically cleaning up after the “Blizzard of 2016” in the northeastern US. The job is not as onerous as anticipated and is going slowly because the government is in charge. However, it is time for an intellectual clean-up because of what went on. The entire sequence of events is a classic example of environmental and climatic exploitation that parallels the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) deception. They show what is wrong with weather and climate forecasts, and how it is all amplified and perpetuated by people who don’t know what they are talking about, or, worse, want to know.

The underlying objective was to hype the potential for catastrophe against a backdrop of implications that the event is unnatural. The actors on the stage were the weather office bureaucrats at National Weather Service (NWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who are key players in the global climate deception that is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Mainstream media TV meteorologists were seeking sensationalismunder the guise of warning and protecting the people and supported them as usual. Regular mainstream media ambulance-chasing reporters, looking for extremes and creating them when necessary followed them on stage. They later produced stories explaining how the storm was evidence of climate change and global warming. They did this as they ignored the physical evidence, reality, the historical context, and the actual mechanisms of climate change.

There's more. Tim states wrongly that the forecast models "failed". They didn't. They were pretty well spot on. Nevertheless Tim wrote:

The Blizzard is a classic example of how those with a political agenda took a normal, natural, event and turned it into a potential catastrophe. They gave their claims legitimacy with computer models. The compliant sensation-seeking media repeated and amplified the story until politicians were left with no choice but to overreact. In fact, this is a self-inflicted wound because the politicians lead people to expect the government to look after them.

The final fiasco is that disciples of the false story about human-caused global warming saw an opportunity to further their agenda. They ignore the fact that the models were wrong about the blizzard and make claims that are scientifically inaccurate. Of course, they will never give up as long as they ignore reality and their jobs and careers are dependent on maintaining the deception. The storm of 2016 shows how the deceptions are occurring at the local and global scale.

Notice all the conspiracy theorising from Tim, even just in those few paragraphs, Tim has covered all but one of the seven criteria used to define conspiracist thinking. Take my interpretations with a grain of salt. I'm not a cognitive scientist and might have some of them wrong, but you get the general idea:

Persecuted Victim: Self-identifying as the victim of an organised persecution. This is the only one that Tim missed out, this time around. Or I couldn't find him self-identifying as a persecuted victim.

Nihilistic Skepticism or Over-riding Suspicion: Refusing to believe anything that doesn't fit into the conspiracy theory. For example, refusing to believe that storm Jonas was as bad as was reported.

Nothing occurs by Accident: Weaving into the conspiracy narrative the fact that it wasn't just NOAA and NWS who are in on the conspiracy, all the mainstream media and TV meteorologists were too - they were "seeking sensationalism".

Something Must be Wrong: Switching liberally between different, even contradictory conspiracy theories that have in common only the presumption that there is something wrong in the official account by the alleged conspirators. His notion that the motives of NOAA and NWS were to perpetuate the climate hoax conspiracy, while mainstream media and TV meteorologists said the same thing, but in their case it was "ambulance-chasing" and "seeking sensationalism".

Self-Sealing Reasoning: Interpreting any evidence against the conspiracy as evidence for (or of) the conspiracy. Again, Tim seems to think that evidence that everyone, from government weather services to mainstream media, all forecasting the same thing, is proof they were all in on the conspiracy.

Unreflexive Counterfactual Thinking: This refers to hypotheses "built on a non-existent, counterfactual state of the world, even though knowledge about the true state of the world was demonstrably available at the time". In this case, storm Jonas happened almost exactly as forecast, but Tim is trying to argue that, contrary to all evidence, it was somewhere between "normal" and non-existent, and claimed (wrongly) that the forecasts failed.

Tim Ball's unreflexive counterfactual thinking

Tim went on to tell his readers how the forecasts were hyped on the grounds that all the weather models were, unusually for a storm, predicting something similar. For Tim, that seems to be evidence of something or the other. This seems to be a great example of unreflexive counterfactual thinking on Tim's part. Tim quoted an article at Slate:

“Since early Saturday, nearly every single run of every major model has shown the potential for a foot or two of snowfall on a track to hit somewhere between Northern Virginia and Boston. What’s amazing—perhaps even more so than the impressive potential snow totals—is that all the major weather models are already locked in so far in advance. Simply put: There’s definitely a big storm coming, it’s just the details that are still being worked out.”

Then he wrote something very odd. As I've pointed out further down, Wunderground weather forecaster Steve Gregory wrote, after the event:

Forecasts for the Super Blizzard of 2016 was one of the best examples of increasing model skill in recent years – with both the GFS and ECMWF calling for a major snow storm in the Mid-Atlantic region over a week ahead of time – and with little deviation in the forecast right up thru the event itself.

By contrast, Tim said that the prediction was wrong. Which is wrong. The forecasts described in the Slate article were pretty well spot on. It panned out almost exactly as forecast. Tim isn't just a climate change denier, he's also a weather denier. I expect he had to be if he was to try to fit his conspiracy theory to the facts. Rather than adjust his theory to fit the facts, he indulged in some unreflexive counterfactual thinking and changed the facts to fit his conspiracy theory. He wrote:

I am sure many skeptics reading the Slate quote immediately ignored what it said when they read the phrase “every major model.” Once again they are justified as the failed predictions attest. In this case, it is not just a single model failure but all of them.

2016 blizzard was not "normal", it was a notable among notable nor'easters

Tim's claim that all the models failed isn't borne out by the evidence. Nor was his apparent claim that the storm wasn't any big deal. I say apparent, but as always it's difficult to fathom just what Tim Ball is trying to say. Tim claimed:

The storm of 2016 was a standard “Nor’easter. They are so normal that there is a separate entry in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia lists around 28 nor'easters that were "notable". That is, they were not "normal" or "standard". The January 2016 storm is described it as "very severe", including a storm surge rivaling that of Hurricane Sandy. In other words it was a notable among notables, not at all normal or standard:

January 2016 blizzard (also known as Winter Storm Jonas, Snowzilla, or The Blizzard of 2016 by media outlets) - Between January 23rd and 24th, a very severe Nor'easter dumped 2 to 3 feet of snow in the East Coast of the United States. States of Emergencies were declared in 12 States in advance of the storm as well as by the Mayor of Washington D.C.. The blizzard also caused significant storm surge in New Jersey and Delaware that was equal to or worse than Hurricane Sandy. Sustained damaging winds over 50 mph were recorded in many coastal communities, with a maximum gust to 85 mph on Assateague Island, Virginia. A total of 55 people died due to the storm.

Jonas was the fourth most severe storm in at least 66 years

It's not just Wikipedia. Going by the accounts of weather experts (which Tim is not), the storm was anything but standard or normal. It was a monster of a storm and the fourth most severe storm in at least 66 years. According to Jeff Masters and Bob Henson at Wunderground.com:

The massive blizzard that rocked the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast U.S. last weekend, killing at least 58 and leaving over $2 billion in damage, has been rated the 4th most severe snowstorm to hit the area in the past 66 years, said NOAA. A Category 4 or “Crippling” rating was given to the storm using NOAA’s Northeast Snowfall Impact Scale, also known as NESIS. NESIS scores are a function of the area affected by the snowstorm, the amount of snow, and the number of people living in the path of the storm. Wikipedia has a list of NESIS rankings based on the original scale (created by Paul Kocin and Louis Uccellini] as well as a revised version implemented by NOAA in 2005.

The only stronger storms on the NESIS scale since 1950, according to NOAA, were:

Category 5 - March 1993, Mid-Atlantic/New England

Category 5 - January 1996, Midwest/Mid-Atlantic/New England

Category 4 – March 1960, Midwest/Mid-Atlantic/New England

In their article, Jeff Masters and Bob Henson also indicate the rating of the storm using different measures. By whatever measure, it was a big one. In some regions that more commonly get heavy snowfalls it wasn't too special. In others it was sufficiently unusual to shut down major cities.

Wrong year: wrong storm - Tim's "failed" claim is based on a January 2015 article

Getting back to Tim Ball's article, I'm still trying to figure out what made him think the forecasts and all the weather models "failed". What he did was quote from articles about a storm forecast in January a year ago, writing:

There is one interesting difference from previous failures that may reflect a growing awareness in the weather agencies that a credibility gap is growing. In an article titled “Snowstorms forecasters under fire as ‘historic’ accumulation failed to materialize” the spokesperson for the US National Weather Service said,

And quoted a slab of text from an article on CBC News published on Jan 28, 2015. (Can someone tell Tim what year this is?)

At first I figured that Tim knew that he was writing about two completely different storms. But I read and re-read what he wrote. It seems to me that he really thinks that storm Jonas didn't happen, repeating his wrong notion at the end of his article. He seems to think that Jonas didn't shut down New York and Washington and other places along the mid-Atlantic coast. As reported at Weather.com:

Winter Storm Jonas is the first snowstorm on record to bring 2 feet or more of snow to both Baltimore and New York City. Parts of the greater Washington, D.C. area also saw over 2 feet of snow, bringing the urban corridor to a grinding halt.

The 2015 storm Juno and its forecast was different in some respects and similar in others. From what I can gather it was mainly New York city that didn't get the dump of snow that some had forecast. Most other places did. It was a big storm, and rated a long entry in Wikipedia. It differed from the 2016 storm in that it appeared in weather models only a couple of days before it hit. Also unlike the 2016 storm, it didn't appear in all the weather models, or not at the same time. It was a very tricky storm. It didn't cause as much overall damage as the one this year did.

You can read about the "Blizzard of 2015" in an article by Bob Henson and Jeff Masters at WeatherUnderground. It includes discussion of how to best convey uncertain forecasts, particularly when the worst case scenario can cripple cities and be deadly. (The discussion would go over the head of a conspiracy crank like Tim Ball.)

Before the 2016 storm arrived, Eric Holthaus mentioned the 2015 storm (in the article from which Tim quoted), saying how this forecast was different to the one in 2015, warning:

For those of you wishing this storm away, the forecast is a sharp contrast to the late-January blizzard of 2015 that famously spared New York City at the last minute. This week’s storm will be a sprawling slow-mover, virtually guaranteeing heavy, multi-inch snowfall across a vast swath from Virginia to New England. So, my advice from October still stands: Buy a snowblower.

The 2016 forecasts were very good

While Tim thought the storm forecasts failed, the experts didn't, except for the fact that New York city got more snow than was expected. Wunderground weather forecaster Steve Gregory wrote, after the event:

Forecasts for the Super Blizzard of 2016 was one of the best examples of increasing model skill in recent years – with both the GFS and ECMWF calling for a major snow storm in the Mid-Atlantic region over a week ahead of time – and with little deviation in the forecast right up thru the event itself. But while the actual northern edge of the snow verified amazingly close to model forecasts, total snowfall in the northernmost sector of the storm turned out to be much greater than originally anticipated. Of all model forecast metrics – this one aspect of the storm ‘should’ have been anticipated by most seasoned forecasters (including myself!).

He went on to explain why the heavier snowfall in the northenmost sector should have been anticipated, talking about "an enhanced ‘deformation zone’", which forms as a storm matures, but is difficult for weather models to capture well. Steve Gregory explains:

Deformation zones are very complicated processes in the atmosphere, and are usually found at the outer edge of an extratropical low pressure system – and most notably for an occluded storm near and to the north of the NW-N-NE sector of the surface occlusion. They are areas where the atmosphere is being stretched and sheared in different directions. ...

...The enhanced snow bands within the deformation should have been anticipated by most seasoned forecasters – and considering I discussed this exact feature the day before the storm – this admonishment goes double for me!

Stefan Rahmstorf explores possible linkages with AMOC

Blizzard Jonas on the US east coast has just shattered snowfall records. Both weather forecasters and climate experts have linked the high snowfall amounts to the exceptionally warm sea surface temperatures off the east coast. In this post I will examine a related question: why are sea surface temperatures so high there, as shown in the snapshot from Climate Reanalyzer below?

He is discussing the possible linkage with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which seems to be slowing down.

The WUWT 'One World Government' conspiracy theory

The remainder of Tim's article was even less coherent than the first part. He couldn't distinguish between weather forecasts and long term climate projections. As well as that confusion, Tim tied himself up in knots with his conspiracy theorising, writing how:

Storm Jonas was a "a standard “Nor’easter”. (Tim couldn't seem to make up his mind whether it happened or not.)

To understand why Tim is having so much difficulty trying to weave Jonas into his One World Government conspiracy theory, have a read of this article by Andrew Handley, which describes some other variations on the theme. His article has the title: "10 Insane Conspiracy Theories About The New World Order". The WUWT conspiracy theory is up there with the best of them.

23 comments:

Poor Tim Ball thinks that any evidence that computer modelling can be accurate must be denied. Silly man: hasn't he forgotten that at WUWT they practice recurring amnesia so they can immediately forget any such evidence.

And quoted a slab of text from an article on CBC News published on Jan 28, 2015. (Can someone tell Tim what year this is?)

Why ... yes:

Stephen WildeJanuary 31, 2016 at 12:25 pm

Some of that material relates to a storm forecast in early 2015, not 2016.

Tim should consider whether that should be made clearer.

No response as yet. This gave me a chuckle:

BarryJanuary 31, 2016 at 5:37 pm

The snow data were “adjusted”, just like global temperature data. As Dr. Ball says, the models were all wrong and there was hardly any snowfall at all.

MenicholasJanuary 31, 2016 at 5:46 pm

/sarc?

This was an absolute gem:

Ball: It is nice to learn that NOAA has records covering the entire multi-billion-year history of the region as the word “ever” indicates. Maybe they could use these to put their claims about the record warm in 2015 in perspective.

Translation: We here at WUWT know of only two relevant time scales, a bazillion years ago until the end of the Little Ice Age, and the past 18 years.

Update: credit where credit is due, a number of WUWT regulars (plus some I don't recognize as such) are calling out Dr. Ball for his misleading statements and sloppy mistakes.

---------------

Ric WermeJanuary 31, 2016 at 2:15 pm

[Ball] "The storm of 2016 was a standard “Nor’easter”. They are so normal that there is a separate entry in Wikipedia. These storms develop as low-pressure systems along the Polar Front, the boundary between the cold polar air and the warmer subtropical air. They begin in the lee of the Rocky Mountains and are often called Alberta or Canadian Clippers. In the interior of the continent, the circulation brings moisture from the Gulf of Mexico to create legendary blizzards. When the Cold Front pushes toward the Atlantic coast, it tends to run parallel to the coast and the low-pressure system circulation means moisture is picked up from the Atlantic Ocean, and the prevailing northeast winds provide both the name “nor’easter” and the heavy snow conditions."

There’s a lot to critique in here. Most doesn’t matter all that much to a lot of people, but it’s all important to us New England snow freaks.

First, the recent storm was not an Alberta Clipper. It came ashore in California and trekked across the country. I’m not sure what it brought to the Gulf states, perhaps someone has the time to fill that in. These southern storms pick up a lot of Gulf moisture and with the storm track south, there’s cold air to the north, and after making the transition to a coastal storm they can clobber the mid-Atlantic states.

The blizzard that hit at the end of the Copenhagen CoP that forced President Obama to bail a day early may have been one of these, the 1993 “Storm of the Century” formed in the western Gulf of Mexico and spun up quickly there.

Alberta Clippers start out moisture starved, travel across the northern US, transfer their energy to the coast around southern New England and may “bomb out” in the Gulf of Maine. They generally bring me just a few inches of nuisance snow.

The best storms for me generally bring rain to Boston. They come up the coast, but come inland west of Boston and east of me. However, they miss out on some of the moisture feed off the Atlantic and it turns out the biggest snow storms here are smaller than the NWS records in Portland ME, Boston MA, Worcester, MA, and Hartford CT. We just keep the snow longer than they do.

Here are some good notes on the 1993 storm – http://www.srh.noaa.gov/tlh/?n=march1993_superstorm

---------------

Peter MorrisJanuary 31, 2016 at 2:51 pm

Dr. Ball you need to fix your reporting. The blizzard might have been overhyped but your completely wrong (not inaccurate, wrong) figures for the snowfall totals make you look like a raving lunatic.

I’ve been lurking here for a long time, and this is my first post, mainly because I believe the truth is much more important than anything else. Don’t drag this website down with this garbage.

Phil.January 31, 2016 at 7:53 pm

Agreed, in the Philadelphia/NJ region the forecast was spot on, slightly underestimated NYC but as typical for such storms in this region the northern boundary can be quite sharp and a few miles variation can make a large difference.

I was expecting 20″+ and we got ~23″, I had to dig the most snow from my driveway in the 30 years I’ve lived here. The strong winds (also accurately predicted) caused some drifting, the bottom of the drive was 30″+ deep. We were lucky that the storm hit over the weekend allowing the snow clearance crews to do a great job in clearing the roads. Should the forecasts for this week be as accurate we’ll see the mid 60s on wednesday (not a record but 15ºF above average).

I think this post should be redacted until the factual errors are corrected: e.g. connecting this storm to Alberta Clippers, apparent confusion of a 2015 and the 2016 storm, incorrect snow amounts.

An Alberta clipper (also known as a Canadian Clipper) is a fast moving low pressure area which generally affects the central provinces of Canada and parts of the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes regions of the United States, precipitating a sudden temperature drop and sharp winds.

This storm came out of the south and reformed off of the coast and had little or no effect on the area identified in the definition. That southern path is common in my experience for heavy snows that have hit the mid Atlantic. Alberta Clippers tend to bring cold but dump their snow in the Appalachians before they get to the DC area.

---------------

James in PhillyJanuary 31, 2016 at 8:33 pm

I wonder where this quote came from:

“While Philadelphia, New York and New Jersey had braced for 30 to 60 centimetres of snow, they got far less than that. New York City received about 20 centimetres, Philadelphia a mere 2.5 centimetres or so. New Jersey got up to 20 centimeters.”

I live just outside of Philadelphia and we got a little over 20 inches of snow. That would add up to a mere 50 cm from my back of the envelope calculation. C’mon. Let’s get the facts right.

So Ball takes a Slate article from this year’s storm. (One that dropped 33 inches of snow on one of my siblings’ house in NE New Jersey, and 27 inches on another in Brooklyn, and over 40 inches )

Then, under his aptly titled section “The Basis for the Hype” he links to a CBC.CA article from January 2015 – talking about a different storm where the weather forecasting wasn’t accurate like this one was.

Then he jumps back in time (and out of context) to a 2008 New Scientist story that talks about regional -climate- predictions, not -weather- predictions.

Then he mixes up Nor’easter and Alberta Clipper – two entirely different weather phenomena (they both have Wikipedia articles, and Nor’easters are not the ones that start near the Rockies).

All to claim a big storm wasn’t a big storm? Not sure what he’s trying to say here.

to complete one sentence: “over 40 inches of snow in West Virginia.” http://wvmetronews.com/2016/01/25/berkeley-county-community-heads-list-of-snowfall-totals/

Ric WermeFebruary 1, 2016 at 4:39 am

This isn’t the first WUWT post to have a big mistake, it won’t be the last. WUWT policy has been to leave the post up, possibly with a disclaimer, instead of making it disappear like some lesser sites do. One my posts leaped to a bogus conclusion because I hadn’t consider there might be a time of observation issue. One frequent poster posted a few major errors but refused to acknowledge he might be wrong (he has his own blog now).

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All you need to know about WUWT

WUWT insider Willis Eschenbach tells you all you need to know about Anthony Watts and his blog, WattsUpWithThat (WUWT). As part of his scathing commentary, Wondering Willis accuses Anthony Watts of being clueless about the blog articles he posts. To paraphrase:

Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece...(he couldn't tell if it would)... stand the harsh light of public exposure.

Definition of Denier (Oxford): A person who denies something, especially someone who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence.
‘a prominent denier of global warming’
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